Struggling and budding writers

16th. Sept. 2017 No progress on the literary front for me this week, simply because I’m being persuaded that my current WIP is not a good idea. I have seen figures (statistics) that support the premise that ‘series’ novels outsell ‘cross-genre’ novels by something like 80% to 20%. Having now published two thrillers with Marcus Blake as the main character, it makes sense for me to go for a third book with Marcus leading the way. But this puts me into the literary straight-jacket I’ve mentioned before, knowing I have to follow that line to improve my potential readership. I need a good plot for Marcus, and at the moment I’m more likely to win the lottery than I am to find a good plot. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that something turns up. We were at a family wedding last night. My niece, Sarah, was marrying her partner, Simon who she has lived with for about ten years. They have a daughter called Jasmine and a son, Hugh. Jasmine was very keen to meet me because she was amazed to discover some time ago that there was an author in the family. And not just that, but her Uncle Matthew had been mentioned in the credits to one of the books. She even took the book into school for a “Show and Tell”. Jasmine has already written a story: a five page story. She also played the Wedding March on the keyboard for her mum and dad as they walked up the aisle. Certainly a very talented little girl. We had to meet. Jasmine told me she would like to write another story, so I asked her to come up with a 20 page book this time, and I will see if I can get it published for her. I would use CreateSpace if it’s possible, or maybe Lulu, but I would love to able to do this for her. I’ve no idea if I can produce a book that small, or even if CS will accept my account with Jasmine as the author. Time will tell though. It was lovely talking to Jasmine: she seemed so shy, and perhaps a little intimidated by my ‘reputation’. On the subject of being the author for a title: I had to persuade CS that my re-sized paperback, Roselli’s Gold, was really my book. I sent the required proof to them and have since received the new book. Right size too. Tomorrow we are off on a five day break. I’ve hired a motor-home and we’ll drive to Dorset and Devon. It’s a ‘try-out’ for us. I’ve never driven a motor-home before, so it looks like it could be fun. We’re not hiring a Winnebago, just a 2 berth Chausson. We’re taking the dog with us. I have downloaded a book on Facebook advertising after seeking advice on one of the forums I use. In response to the question about audience relevance, I was told that anything below 9 is a waste of time. The book I downloaded is called ‘HELP, my Facebook ads suck!’ by Michael Cooper. At a cost of under £4, it isn’t money wasted. And when you consider my relevance on UK is 4, and on USA it’s 7, then I need help. The author of the book has an impressive CV, and the author who suggested the book has never dropped below a relevance of 9 since he bought the book. So here goes, maybe I’ll crack this FB advertising lark and see some improvement in my ROI. And maybe I’ll unearth a decent plot for Marcus Blake. Wish me luck.

Royalty and royalties with links to the past.

9th Sept. 2017 One event this week pricked my memory, taking me back to my early teenage years. It was the arrival of Prince George at his new school, St. Thomas’s, in Battersea. Watching the news item on TV, I noticed an arch behind Prince William (George’s father), and thought I recognised it. Then there was a shot of the school front, and I knew it had to be my old school, Sir Walter St. John’s, known as “Sinjuns”. I Googled it and, sure enough, there it was. It’s a Grade 2 listed building now. I left that school when I was fourteen, in my third year, because we moved down to Portsmouth. I took Pat up to the school once. This was before the M25, London orbital motorway was built. We always travelled through London when driving to see family or returning to base. I detoured up to Battersea High Street and stopped outside the school. The name had been changed, much to my disappointment. It was named after some councillor: almost certainly a political decision by a socialist council; after all, the founder, Sir Walter St. John, was a wealthy man. He set up the school in 1700 for the village of Battersea and the surrounding area. I’ve now joined the Sinjuns Facebook group. On the book front, I came up against a hurdle with CreateSpace I haven’t encountered before: changing one of my titles from a 9x6 size to 8x5.25. The book had to be unpublished (deleted), and the new size listed as a new book. This was explained by CS. After doing the necessary, and approving the proof, I received an email from the “Content Valuation Team” saying I had to prove I had the rights to do this. The title has been available as a Kindle and paperback for a few years now, so it seems a bit odd that I had to go through this rigmarole when it was CS who explained what I needed to do in order to change the book size. I’ve started dabbling in some research for my latest WIP. The working title is Conor Lenihan Revival because I am bringing the character back from the dead. No, it’s isn’t fantasy, but using editorial licence I have been able to start the novel with Conor almost breathing his last breath. I’m researching Cyberwarfare. It’s something of an eye-opener, being made aware of exactly what’s going on out there. I used cyber warfare in the prequel novel The Eagle’s Covenant, so it makes sense to dabble a bit more. The trouble though with research is that it tends to take you away from the reason for it all, and you end up reading stuff you can never use. It will be a while yet before I can say I’ve enough material to make the bare bones of a good thriller. My Facebook advertising campaign is dragging its heels a bit. I’m performing better with the American audience than I am with UK. The ‘relevance’ factor for USA is 7/10, while UK is a lowly 4/10. I’m spending more than I’m earning, but I’m gritting my teeth and holding on. However I will be having a look at the UK audience and seeing if I can improve the relevance somehow. Could take a while. Hopefully I’ll get there before I run out of money. Wish me luck!

Forging ahead, come rain, come shine

September 2nd. 2017

As we roll on towards autumn, I look back over last week and see the highlight was the amount of money Chindi authors raised for Cancer_UK: a magnificent £482 ($624). The Arundel Festival certainly proved a winner for us because we managed to beat last year’s target of daily sales and the money raised for the Cancer charity. A lot of credit has to go to Carol Thomas who worked jolly hard, supported by her husband, Mason, to bring this to fruition. Carol is a self-published author who writes clever stories. You can see a short trailer of one of Carol’s books, Crazy Over You here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfA-RjTDI94. A number of us took a turn on the stall, which meant we all endured the heat (and the rain), and managed to sell some books. The next big event for us, unless we squeeze one in before Christmas, will be the UK Southern Book show at Worthing on the South Coast. This will be in March, so more of that next year. I have posted two Facebook adverts for my thriller, A Dangerous Game. I put the promotion price back up to £2.99, and targeted audiences in North America for one ad, and UK for the other. I’m switching the ads off and on according to the time of day, hopefully trying to avoid nights when most of my targets will be sleeping. So far I have just managed to sell enough books each day to cover the daily cost of the campaign. I know I will have to keep an eye on the ROI, but equally important at the moment is learning how to “tweak” my adverts for maximum benefit. I have also teamed up with four other authors to promote a box set of cross-genre novels. It’s a bold attempt at drilling into the hard earth and uncovering readers who prefer to read across the different genres. It’s risky, because not everyone wants to buy a set of books that probably contain three of which they would never read. Contracts have been signed, and brain-storming has begun on the how, why and what of the campaign. Launch date is probably going to be around the end of October. Price will be at something like £0.99 for a short period, and then will go up to around £3.99. One of the things we’ve been asked to do is get ARC readers for the box set, and pick up some reviews. So if any of you who are reading this blog would like to have a stab at being one of the ARC readers, contact me at www.michaelparkerbooks.com/. I had another go at my current WIP. I keep getting pulled away, sometimes because I find other jobs to do, but more so by the absence of any real plot structure. I could fill it with a load of nonsense and call it a thriller, but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I gave in to that little demon. I was tempted to kill one of my characters off, simply because the way in which I had composed the paragraph demanded that it ended dramatically, and this person’s death was the only way. The trouble with that, and it would have been fairly dramatic, is that I need this character later in the story. Our Chindi group have an on-line meeting on Monday evening. I hope it doesn’t take too long; England are playing Slovakia, and it’s on TV. Hope I don’t miss it (the game, I mean) Wish me luck!

The Hard Yards

August 27th. 2017

The weather is warming up along with our sales on the Chindi book stall at the Arundel Festival. Each day those manning the stall manage to sell more than on the same day last year. Tomorrow, a bank holiday here in UK, is the last day, and we hope to be able to declare a real bonus for the Cancer_UK charity we are supporting with our book sales. I popped along last Thursday. Got there early and left at mid-day. Sales were so slow that we only sold one book; fortunately it was one of mine. Sales did pick up during the afternoon though. The photo on the left was taken yesterday. It shows Carol Thomas, Helen Christmas and Dan Jones, all members of Chindi, hard at work in the sunshine. You can see more of them and our work at www.chindi-authors.co.uk. I’ve also been keeping an eye on my book sales on-line, and can see the benefits of using an ongoing advertising campaign like Facebook. Although I’m not quite clearing my investment, sales have been good enough to make it worthwhile. However, I now need to reconstruct the advert and target another audience. I received an e-mail alert from Facebook during the week telling me that there had been a sudden change in the activity on my advert. Trouble was, they didn’t say if it was good or bad. I had to decipher all the metrics to make sense of it. I believe I was being told that they had more or less exhausted my chosen audience, which is why I will be changing tack. I have registered my interest (and paid) in a Literary event at Crawley Library in October. It’s about an hour away from here, but I’m quite happy to make the journey and, hopefully, find more readers. There’s also a chance I can meet my son for a late lunch if he isn’t working, but the main reason is to sell books. But it hasn’t all been about selling books. Last Friday, we went along to Petworth to meet our No.3 great grandson, Orin. He is six months old. He brought his mum, Gemma, along with him. We had a picnic in the grounds of Petworth House. It was lovely sitting under the shade of the trees and having him and Gemma to ourselves for a while. As a result of all that is going on in my busy schedule, I haven’t put pen to paper; so my latest thriller is gathering dust on the electronic bookshelf. I can’t see me making much progress in the next few weeks either, so perhaps I have resigned myself to the fact that there will not be another Michael Parker release for the foreseeable future: certainly not this year. I do run ideas over in my head, but I suspect that’s the same for all writers; how else would we fill our thinking moments? Something will turn up though, I’m sure it will. Wish me luck.

My engaging selling technique

August 19th. 2017 The good news from the previous seven days is that the follow-on effect from my BookBub promotion is still working: I have achieved 25% ROI at the moment, and I’m still selling books. Now the really difficult bit starts: how to keep the balls in the air. My Amazon ad. was a disaster, and now I’m hoping I can achieve better results with my latest Facebook advert. It’s too soon to make an appraisal, but early results show I might need to put my learning cap on and start tweaking. I’ll let the weekend through before trying anything.

Today I was at Arundel for the Festival. Our Chindi group (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) have book stall there in support of Cancer_UK. I arrived early and helped Carol Thomas and her husband, Mason, set up the table (in the road), and waited for the punters to roll up. I managed to sell five books before finishing at mid-day. Quite a result for me: it really put a smile on my face. I enjoyed talking with the people who came up to the stall, even the elderly lady who passed by pushing her walker with a few sticks of rhubarb sticking out of her shopping bag. It made for an interesting conversation on how cheap the rhubarb was just up the road. And no, she didn’t want to buy any books. I was asked what the “mark-up” is for our books. I explained to the man who asked the question that we make nothing from paperback books because we are self-published authors. We would have to set up table top sales every day of the year and hope to sell a few books every day to cover our costs. But the important point is the engagement we have with the public, getting our name into their minds and hoping — hoping — that they look us up on our respective websites and by our ebooks. I had two copies of my hard edged romance, Past Imperfect with me, and managed to sell them. My sales skills can be unbelievable at times. I just wish I knew what I said that made these lovely people buy them. We also meet other writers who tend to be very shy in admitting they are writers too. Once we’ve dragged the truth out of them they are quite happy to talk about their work. It isn’t unusual to learn that they have written one book and are quite happy with that. One lady I spoke to had written an autobiography of her short, three month spell working in a Palestinian refugee camp. The conversation looked like it might be heading towards a political narrative, so I steered away from the subject and talked about the various books we had on display. If any of you are interested, her name is Alice Merrill and her book is called Quiet Resistance. It’s available on Amazon. And almost as trustworthy as a reliable clock, the British weather let us know it was not to be laughed at. It chucked it down for about ten minutes. It cleared the streets and made us throw a protective sheet over our books. Eventually the table was pulled in off the street and into the shelter available in front of the Cancer charity shop we are supporting. Now I need to think about writing again and steering my main character, Conor Lenihan, into trouble with the Israelis and anybody else who dare steps in his way. He’s pretty tough, you know. Wish me luck!

Singing in the rain

August 12th. 2017 The week began for me really on Wednesday because of two events. Prior to that we took our friend Pauline back up to Baldock. It started raining as soon as we arrived, and eventually forced us all, including Pauline’s daughter and son-in-law, to abandon any hope of spending time chatting and we were forced to get back in the cars. We couldn’t use the restaurants because we had dogs with us. But Wednesday — our No. 3 great grandson’s naming ceremony and my BookBub promotion. We turned up at the BBQ in the park in pouring rain. Set up a Wendy house (3x3 garden gazebo) alongside our son’s, pitched them both to the large, wooden, three sided lean to, and sheltered from the rain. The BBQ was alight and smoking at 11 am when we arrived and still smoking at 3.30 when we left. It poured with rain incessantly all day. We all got wet, the dogs got filthy and everyone’s clothes needed a wash by the end of the day. But being stoical, we all refused to let it dampen our spirits, and the ceremony went ahead as planned. It was good to mingle with the family and our grand-daughter’s friends. It was a real family bash and I know we all enjoyed it. The other “emotional” event for me, the BookBub promo, was a little nerve wracking. I wasn’t convinced it would be a success, and a little concerned that I had maybe lost a lot on the deal. However, things brightened considerably overnight, and by Thursday evening I had just about broken even. Today (Saturday) I am still selling and consequently making a profit on my investment as well as adding a whole new tranche of readers. I expected sales to dwindle as the days went by, but my sales are still buoyant. I made the No. 1 spot in Canada, which included a “best seller” banner on the sales page. Can’t be bad. I decided to try out Amazon Ads to coincide with my BookBub promotion. I elected to spend $5 a day for a week, just to see how effective it could be. Today I have spent nothing, had 99 impressions and no clicks. Obviously my advertising skills are not persuading anyone to click, so that’s something I need to bear in mind when I promote through Facebook — something I’m planning to do within the next few days. Although I haven’t put pen to paper this week, my WIP hasn’t been far from my mind. I still struggle with the concept of a series character, preferring the idea of writing stand-alone books. But seeing the competition among indie writers favours the series novelists, I know I need to do something about it, although I feel as though I’m prostituting myself for the sake of sales. Goodness me, what we writers have to do to get recognition. Looking ahead, our Chindi group will be supporting Cancer_UK at Arundel in a week’s time. I’ll be there hoping it doesn’t rain, but you can never tell with dear old England. Hopefully I’ll sell some books, but truthfully, it’s more about engaging with potential readers in the hope they will check out my website and buy my books. Oh, I was more successful in North America with my BookBub deal than here in UK. Am I about to crack the American market? Wish me luck!

Getting some mileage in

4th. August 2017 My post is one day early this week because we are travelling back up to Baldock to return our friend and her little Chihuahua to her daughter tomorrow. It’s been an interesting week but with very little time to write. I’ve managed about 1000 words and a great deal of head scratching. Last Monday, my book group, Chindi (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) had an on-line meeting. We managed this through a company called Zoom. It’s strange to see your PC monitor filled with individual TV images of those who logged on. It can be a little hectic, but still possible to get a conversation going and come up with some sensible suggestions. We are already looking ahead to a November event, and hope to have something put together in time to publicise it. I’m looking forward to the BookBub promotion of my thriller, A Dangerous Game. I dropped the price to £0.99 in readiness for the promotion. You can see the book at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AKCLP60/?tag I’ve also submitted it to ENT, but haven’t heard from them yet. If I can get some decent mileage out of this, then maybe I can keep those balls in the air and hold good rankings for some considerable time. I also have a sponsorship with Kindle Book Review for The Eagle’s Covenant. This will be for August, but unlike other promotions, this has nothing to do with a price change or new launch, but simply having my book on the right hand side of their main web page. I won’t know how effective this is until later in the month when I can check my individual book sales. The link to their home page is https://www.thekindlebookreview.net The newspapers over here in UK are talking about the latest development in DNA modification through genetic engineering. It’s made the TV news feeds as well. I’m pleased to say that genetic engineering was featured in my book, Where the Wicked Dwell. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WD8988W/?tag. It doesn’t make me a clued up scientist, but at least I’m on the ball. During the week we went to an open museum at Singleton, a few miles north from us here at Pagham. It’s known as the ‘Living Village’. The museum is dedicated to life throughout the Middle Ages and towards the 18th and 19th centuries. The houses on display have all been pulled down, removed from their locations and rebuilt on the site. It provides a fascinating look at how we used to live in those times. Good place for research too if you want to write a novel about those periods. We also went to Queen Elizabeth Country Park up the A3 Portsmouth to London Road, The reason for that is because me and Pat are going to our No. 3 great-grandson’s naming ceremony there next week on Wednesday. Orin will be six months old. We’ve never been to anything like this before, although we’ve been to christenings. It’s a Vegan/Vegetarian affair, which leaves me wondering what we will be having on the BBQ. Flame grilled vegie burger anyone? It’s also the same day as my BookBub promotion. Wish me luck!